I have a lovely, functioning i7-930 (X58-UD3R/24GB/RX580) that does everything I needed. Up until I bought a WindowsVR device that requires AVX that this chip doesn't have. I'm looking to do an upgrade on the cheap, and I'm absolutely fine going used. As a general rule, my PC gets mixed use weighted towards gaming and VMware workstation. I'll dabble into movie/3d editing suites/streaming but there is no real work being done that makes money. I tend to retire my PC's into servers and run virtualization software on them so VT-x support and/or AMDs version is desired.

I'd prefer to do this on the cheap, so I'm currently I'm leaning towards something used along the i7-4770(or early gen) line CPU/Mobo and reusing the RAM. However, building relatively cheap B450/X470 Ryzen system also looks doable in the $600 range. I am trying to stay down towards $400, but I can stretch if it seems worthwhile trade off. While I will overclock my CPU if the option is there, it's not a requirement and when buying used I'm leary of any K series processors and what previous owners may have done to them.

TR thoughts/suggestions?

Edit: Canadian $ funds, my bad for not including that.

Last edited by Village on Wed Dec 19, 2018 5:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The i5 I'm concerned with fewer threads and it's impact on my usage. Not one to close out of things and say game or just do X, everything runs. VMWare running, game up oh and streaming video to the PS4. Not that it often happens at the same time, but that's just how I like it to roll. New the smarter money looks to go AMD, used with reusing DDR3 ram Intel looks like an option.

I'd probably take a single threaded Intel core over an AMD SMT core all else being equal. SMT/HT isn't magic, and Intel still has a slight edge on IPC and real-world clocks with their latest revisions of Turboboost.

I think the real advantage of AMD over Intel on 6 core parts is the overclocking and cheaper motherboards.

How about replacing that CA$155 motherboard with a CA$108 Gigabyte B450 Aorus M?

Village wrote:

I'd prefer to do this on the cheap, so I'm currently I'm leaning towards something used along the i7-4770(or early gen) line CPU/Mobo and reusing the RAM.

I wouldn't recommend this path, but if you're really interested, I have a Core i7-4770K processor (never overclocked), a Hyper 212Evo cooler, 4x4 GiB of PC3-12800 and a dead Z87 motherboard here in my parts box after a recent repair/upgrade of a family member's PC.

How about replacing that CA$155 motherboard with a CA$108 Gigabyte B450 Aorus M?

Primarily went with a X470 for the flexibility to drop in a Ryzen 7 3x00X when they launch. B450 should suffice, but I was concerned VRMs might not be enough to push the new ones.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

I wouldn't recommend this path, but if you're really interested, I have a Core i7-4770K processor (never overclocked), a Hyper 212Evo cooler, 4x4 GiB of PC3-12800 and a dead Z87 motherboard here in my parts box after a recent repair/upgrade of a family member's PC.

Any particular reason why, not good value? Looking at used market, at least on the Z77/I7-3770 line it looks like could pull it off for >$300cdn for what I think is roughly 40% boost in performance. I7-4770 is a bit of a stretch and seems like the price delta closes on the Ryzen 5 2600 build enough to make that worthwhile.

Honestly, Z77 + i7-3770 isn't really that much of an upgrade, and having a few Ivy Bridge Xeons around, I'm kind of "a fan" of Ivy, if you can call it that. One exception would be power consumption, where Ivy is an Intel champ. I love dabbling with old systems, but I also don't know if I would recommend it. I'm in the US, and I keep an eye on ebay for i7-3770 and 3770K just for the heck of it, but I'm not impressed by the value. If you did go ivy, you would gain PCIe 3.0, DDR3-1600 officially, and maybe some slight USB and SATA advantages.

I think looking at a Ryzen 5 type new system makes a lot of sense from an overall perspective. IMO. I love high clock speeds and single-threaded dominance, I really do, but over the course of 2017 I settled on two Ryzen 5 1600 PCs for my home: One Windows 10 and one ESXi/vSphere. Whether Intel or AMD, some of the upgrade benefits are due to higher clock speeds (like Kaby and Coffee Lakes) and platform advantages like DDR4 and NVMe. You won't find those benefits in a Sandy or Ivy or Haswell upgrade.

One reason I say it may not feel like much of an upgrade - I inherited an i7-920 system on a nice Asus Rampage Ii Extreme mobo last winter. It's just a garage, play-around system. I didn't remember much about such an old platform, so I had to refresh my memory on FSB and how to overclock with it. But reading that my stepping of 920 was an OC champ, I slapped an H100i V2 on it, and cranked it up to 3.8 GHz. Ten years old, and that CPU is still a bit of a champ in its own right. Sandy Bridge gets a lot of accolades, but the OC 920 system is a fine desktop PC, except for power consumption (which is absolutely ridiculous, but hey, hydropower around my parts). I've got Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge E3 Xeons that have clock speeds in the neighborhood of that 920, and while not exactly a great comparison (not many of the Supermicro mobos they're in can handle a GPU), I don't feel much difference with identical RAM and SSDs between them all.

Be careful on inserting this (or any G34 chip) into the socket. Once you pull that restraining lever, it is either a good install or a piece of silicon jewelry.

If you're not doing a full build you might want to consider X79. Sandy Bridge Xeons (and I believe Ivy Bridge too) have gotten super cheap. I got an E5-2690 for like $106. Add another $60 for a board and it's a cheap upgrade that lets you re-use the DDR3 RAM you have while waiting for whatever new tech makes a full build irresistible.

You can pick up 3770 vanilla or 3770K pretty cheap on ebay/CL these days ~150CAD or so. You can still find S1155 boards still available at reasonable prices new, which lets you reuse at least 16, if not all 24GB of your RAM. I wouldn't trust a used board and to be honest with you, I think the 3770 vanilla is a better option because it's likely been scavenged from a Dell or HP office PC that has been largely idle, never overclocked or overvolted and will have a reltatively low power-on hours count.

Buying a new chip means throwing out 24GB of RAM that will cost you $200CAD to replace, and you'll obviously need to then spend $300 on a board/CPU/cooler.

I would genuinely step up to either a Ryzen 5 2600 for good value productivity box or an i5-8400 if you prioritise gaming, simply because you get the advantage of new ports and interfaces (NVMe, USB 3.1g2, Thunderbolt, hell - even SATA 6GB!) but f you're not going to do that then around ~$250 for the used CPU route is really good value. The step up from your 930 to a 3770 is a much bigger jump than the step up from a 3770 to a Ryzen 5 or Coffee Lake i5, which makes the performance/$ of reusing your RAM significantly higher than buying all-new.

I have an HTPC running an underclocked 3770K and it does everything you've described without any issues. I also have a 2990WX at work and a whole bunch of 6700K boxes and there's no obvious difference between them in terms of general use and responsiveness. How clean and tuned your OS/Browser/Application is matters far more, as does having a modern SSD with good low-queue depth performance. Unless you genuinenly NEED those extra cores (CPU rendering or simulation workloads) or you're aiming for 144Hz AAA gaming then the latest CPUs don't offera massive day-to-day improvement over 5-year-old tech. You said yourself that your 930 feels fine, and the 3770 is a huge upgrade from that already.

If you look at gaming benchmarks between old and new CPUs using a 1080Ti then there's a credible case to dismiss any CPU that isn't current gen and at least 4.5GHz, but put a 1060 or 580 in there and suddenly the difference between CPUs nearly vanishes altogether. This is why the Ryzen 5 1600 was such a well-rated budget gaming chip when it launched because it provided adequate gaming chops to feed midrange cards without problems and saved people $200+ over the equivalent Coffee Lake at launch prices.

There's a reason that intel's 8th gen (6th gen re-re-rebrand) laptops are the hottest selling tech this year, despite having measly sub-2GHz base clocks. Games are largely GPU limited, Rendering is largely core-count limited, and a lot of other everyday stuff relies on fixed-function hardware that makes the model of CPU you have irrelevant, so long as it has that function.

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I'd probably take a single threaded Intel core over an AMD SMT core all else being equal. SMT/HT isn't magic, and Intel still has a slight edge on IPC and real-world clocks with their latest revisions of Turboboost.

I think the real advantage of AMD over Intel on 6 core parts is the overclocking and cheaper motherboards.

Agreed on the Intel w/o HT...they have shown with the 9000 series they can pump out IPC easily.